The present invention relates to a transmission system, and more particularly, to a digital transmission system for transmitting packets of information over a loop between devices coupled to the loop.
In transmission systems having a plurality of devices, such as telephones, terminals, controllers and processors coupled to a transmission carrier, some form of dialog or communication exchange generally takes place between these devices via the transmission carrier. In order to provide for an orderly exchange of information between devices, various network architectures and schemes have been devised; however, many of the existing transmission systems are complex, inefficient, and require large amounts of complex hardware. This is especially true with transmission systems utilizing packet switching schemes. Such schemes require the use of at least one host processor, a number of communication processors (or front end processors), the software associated with each of the processors which is generally very large and very complex, and communication interface devices which interface or couple a user device with the transmission carrier. The transmission carrier generally transfers the information in a serial fashion.
Hence, it is highly desirable to provide a transmission system for interdevice communication which is high speed and overcomes the disadvantages and limitations of the existing systems. The data transmission system of the present invention transfers packets of information in a parallel fashion via a ring, which forms the transmission carrier of the present invention, thereby overcoming the capacity of speed limitations of the present switching network schemes.